Italian opera in the Southern Cone. Transnational vs. national

Ditlev Rindom,

University of Cambridge, UK

Listening to Verdi at Buenos Aires’s Fin-de-Siècle. 

This paper focuses upon the South American premiere of Verdi's Otello in Buenos Aires in June 1888, in order to address a broader set of issues centred upon the relationship between an increasingly stable, commodified Italian operatic canon and the burgeoning Argentinian metropolis. The presentation of Verdi’s latest opera provided a golden opportunity for Buenos Aires to reinforce its position within a global operatic network, while also provoking intense local media interest due to the competition between two Italian impresarios first to present the opera. These juxtaposed productions precipitated a complex legal dispute, as well as engendering a prolonged critical discussion of the opera and its various manifestations (or mediations) as performance. This paper examines the Otello episode in the context of wider discussions surrounding urban development and the operatic canon in fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires, focusing particularly upon ideas about the operatic future and the long-range implications of opera’s complex mediality.

Anibal E. Cetrangolo,

Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires -

Università Ca’Foscari, Venice

The nostalgic willow: Opera on the river

This paper analyzes the penetration of lyric theatre along the rivers of South American countries. Foreign communities - chiefly Italian ones -  built opera houses on the shores of the navigable rivers of the region, above all the Paraná and the Uruguay. This kind of circulation had notable characteristics. Productions were often handled by a single impresario, which meant that the same lyrical product circulated across the borders of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. One can assume, then, that this huge area hosted an enormous audience that attended a unique opera season. In contrast to initial impressions, documentary evidence reveals that important international artists performed in these theatres. It is also evident that these theaters had a very different representative function in comparison with opera houses in the capitals of the country. While the Colon Theater, the Solis, the Municipal of Santiago and the Municipal of Rio, with stable orchestras and choruses, proudly represented the country, provincial theaters - visited occasionally by troupes that remained briefly in the place  - were instead a nostalgic link with a world situated very far away.

RIIA Theaters Group

Berçot, Fernando; Bomfim, Clarissa; Filip, Maria; Ligore, Bruno; Mescalchin, Michele; Murace, Giulia; Weber, Ignacio;

Operatic migrations on the River Parana.

The opera is a cultural object which claims to interdisciplinary and transnational study. The travel of lyric companies crosses frontiers and this fact methodologically banishes the tendency to consider the countries of the continent as isolated realities. Is unsustainable to reduce the analysis of the opera considering sound as the only factor forgetting other constituent components of the lyric scene as management, set design, machinery or choreography. This young team of RIIA coordinated by A. Cetrangolo RIIA is formed by persons from different countries and different areas of interest. The group studies the river theaters and has made a first scan in a specific case, the Teatro Aguiar of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, and aims to develop a protocol that could be applicable to other places.

This object of study was born from the restoration of the curtain that Giuseppe Carmignani painted for Rosario’s Opera House the Teatro El Círculo. This work is a copy of Parma theater curtain showing that migration in opera involved other factors than musical ones. The group analyzes other river presences which show operatic travel in Argentina and Brazil. The analysis of other occupants of those scenarios as the dancers, are considered with relevance.

José Manuel Izquierdo,

University of Cambridge

Italian dominance in Chile’s musical and operatic life, 1890 – 1925: networks and families.

 The two most influential centers of music in Chile between the 1890s and the 1920s where the Teatro Municipal, the opera house in Santiago, and the National Conservatoire. While later generations criticized the period for being “too Italianate”, centered on the performance on opera rather than on local composition, rarely has this idea of Italian influence been scrutinized, or more specifically defined. What was Italian in it? In this paper, which is a work in progress, I want to discuss how the networks of Italian influence generated in the period, and how they sustained an increasing influence not only locally, but in their relation with neighboring countries and Europe. The Teatro Municipal was dominated in musical and administrative terms by the Padovani family, while the Conservatoire by the composers Enrique Soro -whose father was Italian and studied in Milan- and Luigi Stefano Giarda, an Italian composer who wrote the opera for the festivities of the Centenary in 1910. This Italian group influenced local composition, Chilean singers and the selection of opera companies and repertoire during the entire political period. I will study how these two groups (of the Conservatorio and the Teatro Municipal) worked together, and how the Italian families created networks to sustain and dominate local culture. The visit of Pietro Mascagni in 1911, and the increasing criticism by Chilean musicians of this Italian influence in the 1920s will be two important points to be discussed.

Sergio Marcelo de los Santos

Universidad de la República, Uruguay

Renewal and permanence of the opera in Uruguay.

Since the last century, the panorama of the opera in Uruguay has been studied from diverse points of view. The musicological perspective was complemented with the view of historians, sociologists and economists, as well as cultural managers and even artists, who contributed their experience regarding the way in which the genre was linked to institutions and the local public in questions of taste, habit and practices (social, artistic, academic). In this extended field and considering the different eras, history allows to establish a changing role in the presence, consumption and appropriation of the genre. This effect is ruled by migratory circumstances: a country conformed by immigration, which ended up an origin of emigrations. The situation has been extensively analyzed and a more recent period has also been studied, corresponding with the implementation of public cultural policies appropriate to contemporary thinking by the most important institutions of performing arts of the country.

Currently, there is a new situation that must be included as a re elaboration of the presence of opera in Uruguay. This phenomenon has to do with management, production and consumption of opera by young promoters, creators and spectators, with innovative productions on their organization, aesthetic, and reception.

Marita Fornaro Bordolli,

Centro de Investigación en Artes Musicales y Escénicas/

Escuela Universitaria de Música

Universidad de la República, Uruguay

On exoticism and multiculturalism in Uruguayan opera

This paper explores the presence of indigenous cultures, European immigrants and exotic cultures in the operas produced in Uruguay. After an overall picture, including a focus on an idealized Far East, we address the romantic representation of indigenous cultures of the Uruguayan territory (after their extermination) in literature and opera. The analysis focuses on the opera Liropeya (1881; premiered 1912) by León Ribeiro, based on the poem El Charrúa by Pedro Bermúdez; the representation of The Other is characterized in the language of Italian romantic opera. Secondly, this opera is compared with Marta Gruni by Jaurès Lamarque Pons (premiered 1967). This opera, composed after the homonymous sainete of the Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez, is set in a conventillo (communal housing) in Montevideo, inhabited by European immigrants and descendants of enslaved people. Its arias and recitatives are based on two manifestations of popular urban music: tango and Afro-Uruguayan candombe. We reflect upon the presence of these cultures in librettos and music, and it is linked to representations in popular music of the first half of the 20^thcentury.

Laura Malosetti Costa

CONICET – IIPC-TAREA UNSAM (Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires)

Tabaré, migration of an American tragedy

Tabaré is a poem published in 1888 from the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martin. The paper analyzes the mythical origins of the subject: a drama at Spanish conquest of the Rio de la Plata in the sixteenth century, and some aspects of his several – at least four - operatic reformulations. It studies the settings of scenographer Rodolfo Franco for the premiere of Alfredo Schiuma’s version at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires in 1925 and the long literary and iconographic tradition that the tragedy of the early extermination of the charrúa race in Uruguay has inspired.

Diósnio Machado Neto

Laboratório de Musicologia - Dep. de Música da FFCLRP

Universidade de São Paulo - USP

When operetta reigned: the complaint of São Paulo oriundi in 1920

If until the first decade of the twentieth century opera companies that played titles, like Aida, Otello, Il Guarany, Cavalleria Rusticana, were the hub of the cultural practices of São Paulo, from the second decade the situation changed rapidly. In less than a decade, between 1910 and 1920, Italian opera became an elitist object, despite the considerable increase in theaters. Neither the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, built especially for Italian opera, he was able to avoid the visible decline. Other forms went to rival opera: coffee-concertos, cabarets, carnival associations and, above all, operetta. This change was drastic: operetta was not Italian object and the musicians most executed were German or English, as Franz Lehar, von Suppe, Gilbert & Sullivan or Sidney Jones. The purpose of this communication is to present the tensions in the reception of music in the Italian “oriundi” community which had monopolized Sao Paolo’s theaters from 1860. It will be analyzed the commercial aspects of traditional opera seria companies such as Vitale Company, before the emergence of operetta companies. It is studied here the reception of these dynamics by Gazeta Artística.

Enrique Cámara de Landa

Universidad de Valladolid

Music and identity in Humahuaca (Argentina), between opera and huaino

In the carnival of Humahuaca (South American Andean town to which Argentines awarded an important identarian value) live repertoires, genres and music systems from different backgrounds. The presence of a piece of music from an opera composed in the country allows us to reflect on phenomena such as construction of emblems, awareness of property, or invention of tradition. In this sense, it can be considered that also the opera, in a roundabout way, has participated in the process of setting cultural identity in Argentina.